Can India Change Course?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In June, Narendra Modi was sworn in for a third consecutive term as India’s prime minister. But in a surprise outcome, his party, the BJP, failed to win a majority. Modi emerged seriously weakened, and India’s path forward looks far less certain and far more interesting than seemed plausible not long ago. Pratap Bhanu Mehta is one of India’s wisest political observers, a great political theorist and writer, as well as a fierce critic, and occasional target, of Modi and his policies. My colleague, Kanishk Tharoor, spoke with him this week about what the election means for Indian democracy and where the country goes from here.

KANISHK THAROOR

Pratap, it’s a pleasure to speak with you.

PRATAP BHANU MEHTA

It’s great to be here. Thanks.

KANISHK THAROOR

You spoke with us last time in March. That was before the elections had kicked off, the national elections in India. And at that time, it seemed that the outcome was going to be a sort of foregone conclusion, that Modi would win a third term, consolidate his rule, and that some of the concerning trends that many observers had isolated about India would just continue indefinitely. Then the last piece you wrote for us was in June, soon after the elections delivered something of a surprising verdict. Modi did win his third term, but he lost his absolute majority. And at that time, you wrote, “Observers anticipated a sweeping victory for Modi that would have all but converted India into a one-leader, one-ideology, and one-party state. But that did not happen. Indian democracy has triumphed against the odds. Modi’s humbling at the ballot box has saved Indian democracy.” Is that an assessment you still stand by?

PRATAP BHANU MEHTA

Yeah, I think broadly, that’s an assessment I still stand by, which is that it has given Indian democracy breathing room. Obviously, there’s still significant challenges. I think Mr. Modi’s authority has diminished. There’s absolutely no question about it. And we can talk about the different ways in which it has done so. The opposition is empowered. The Supreme Court and independent institutions are showing a little bit more independence. They’re not quite there all the way yet as we had hoped. But certainly, in matters like giving opposition leaders bail when they get arrested, they’re showing some spine. So yes, I think the space for contestation certainly has expanded. I think the critical question is what moves does the government make now and how does the opposition respond to it? So there’s, as it were, one more round left before we can be completely reassured that Indian democracy is entirely safe.

KANISHK THAROOR

Well, before we get into that, I just wanted to get a sense from you of what do you think accounted for the setbacks that BJP faced in the elections? I’m sure they were as surprised as the rest of us by the results. So what do you see as the reasons why the elections delivered the kind of outcome they did?

PRATAP BHANU MEHTA

So the honest truth is we are actually still speculating. I mean, you can parse the data lots of different ways. But I think the two or three things that are emerging very clearly is one, a sense of fatigue with Prime Minister Modi himself. It’s the first time that constituencies in which he campaigned very vigorously, the BJP did not do as well. Maybe you can call it a 10-year fatigue, overplaying his hand, and particularly constituencies in which he gave communally charged speeches. Interestingly, those are the constituencies where the rejection of the BJP was actually the strongest. So clearly, there is something about his personal authority diminishing, I think, that we had underestimated. The second, I think particularly in Uttar Pradesh, which is India’s largest state, where BJP lost a large number of seats, and that was the biggest surprise.

But I think broadly speaking, I mean, I think there’s a background story here, which is: India’s economy has not done catastrophically badly, or at least as badly as the opposition claims. But I think it is becoming increasingly clear that Mr. Modi is not the miracle worker, transformative figure on the economy that people had hoped. And I think one of the striking things in conversations, even just before the election and certainly after the first round, is that even a lot of die-hard BJP supporters were actually more candid about admitting some of the weaknesses on the economic front. India is not in a considerably better place than it was five years ago. And so I think some of those basic bread and butter issues have actually resurfaced.

And on the Hindutva front, the BJP’s official ideology, the consolidation of Hindu nationalism, also there was a little bit of a sense of exhaustion. Not that people rejected the ideology, but ironically, many of the principal things that the BJP claimed it wanted to do, it had actually accomplished. So two of the biggest items on the Hindu nationalist government’s agenda, one was building a temple at the site of a mosque that had been demolished by Hindu militants in the early 1990s, Babri Masjid. And the creation of this temple was supposed to be the crowning glory of Hindu nationalism. It kind of gives Hindu nationalism a national symbol. It’s a symbol of the fact that Hindus are finally reclaiming their own country against Muslim invaders. That’s, in a sense, the political symbolism of it. And Prime Minister Modi himself participated in the consecration of the deity at the temple, almost like a monarch consecrating, in some senses, new gods. So this was supposed to be a crowning moment, and this happened on January 21. And frankly, the mood on January 21st was almost euphoric. I mean, there was almost this sense of ecstasy, in some senses, amongst large numbers of Hindus. And that’s the point at which most people thought that was game, set, and match to Mr. Modi. He’s really tapped into Hindu nationalism. But I think that euphoria ebbed. “Okay, so you’ve done this. Fine. What next?”

I think the second item on the agenda was Kashmir had a special status under the Indian constitution. There was Article 370 of the Indian constitution that had facilitated Kashmir’s accession as a province to India. And it had been a longstanding Hindu nationalist demand that article 370 be abrogated, Kashmir’s special status be revoked. And this government even went one step further. It actually downgraded Kashmir’s status from being a state to being a union territory. So many of these agenda items, in a sense, BJP had actually fulfilled, but there was also a sense of, “Okay, what’s left for Hindu nationalism to do? What’s the next move here?” So I think a sense of exhaustion also seems to have crept in.

KANISHK THAROOR

You mentioned in your last interview with Foreign Affairs that one of the things you were concerned about was the deepening of ethno-nationalism and its accompanying authoritarianism. You’ve suggested that there’s a fatigue with it. But is the reverse that Modi suffered in June sufficient to begin pushing back against the sort of tide of ethno-nationalism that has been rising in the last decade?

PRATAP BHANU MEHTA

No, it’s actually not sufficient. And in fact, I think Hindu nationalism will have another incarnation in the next few months. The reason it’s not sufficient is the following, which is what Hindu nationalism operates at two levels. There’s the level of electoral consolidation: does Hindu nationalism translate into electoral votes? But Hindu nationalism is also a cultural project. It’s also a project of rewriting Indian history. It’s also a project of changing common sense amongst Hindus about their relationships with Muslims. And in particular, Hindu nationalism’s nastiest edge comes from the fact that it seeks to marginalize Muslim minorities, right? Now, when I say exhaustion, I mean exhaustion in an electoral sense, that there was a sense that, “Okay, you’ve accomplished many of the things you set out to accomplish under the garb of Hindu nationalism, but there are lots of other things we want done that haven’t been done.” As I said, the transformation of the economy and so forth, right?

But the cultural project of Hindu nationalism still proceeds actually with incredible vigor. And one of the things we are seeing after the election is that there’s certainly been no letup in violence against Muslims. There have been, in recent weeks, incidents of Muslims being targeted or lynched because they’re suspected of carrying beef. In many states, BJP state governments will engage in acts of vigilante justice, demolish houses of people they think are anti-national. Very coincidentally, most all of them happen to be Muslim, and the Supreme Court has just passed some strictures to that effect. So the cultural project and the project based in civil society of, in a sense, creating more violence and polarization, that project hasn’t yet abated. I think what we just got was a temporary reprieve where the euphoria of the Ram temple did not exactly translate into this overwhelming electoral mandate.

KANISHK THAROOR

It’s still quite early in Modi’s third term, but have you seen any sort of shifts in terms of policy from his government that are striking to you? Or it’s now ruling in coalition, which it has not had to do in the last decade. What have you observed from the last few months of this new Modi?

PRATAP BHANU MEHTA

So there are a couple of things that are very striking. One, actually for the first time in his political career, he seems to be quite out of touch and out of sorts. I mean, he’s a very upfront, aggressive, “I take charge,” “I am everywhere” kind of leader. It’s almost as if they haven’t quite diagnosed or even yet internalized the consequences of their diminished mandate. And I think they’re at a loss to explain it. I mean, I think one of the things that’s actually quite striking about Prime Minister Modi since the election is the lack of those bombastic speeches. There’s not even a whiff of self-understanding or explanation of what went wrong here. It’s almost as if, “We were cheated out of something.” And I think they’re at a genuine intellectual loss in terms of how to actually understand this loss. “We did everything right. How come we lost?” Right?

So in that sense, he’s actually seeming quite out of sorts. I mean, I watch his speeches very closely, very often. It’s really the first time in his long political career, whether you agree or disagree with him, that you actually just feel he’s out of touch, he’s maybe thinking his way through something, but hasn’t quite yet come to terms with what this defeat is. But in the last month or so, practically every measure that they’ve announced, they’ve either had to do a U-turn or shelve, sometimes because of pressure from allies. So for example, there’s a piece of legislation that seeks to regulate Waqf Boards, which are basically Muslim charitable boards, which control vast amounts of resources. And this is, again, a politically charged and commonly charged issue. BJP one and two simply would’ve introduced it and would’ve passed in parliament within, like, 30 seconds without much discussion, or maybe at least an hour without much discussion. It has gone to a parliamentary select committee. The opposition has been demanding a caste census, which historically the BJP has not been in favor of. In fact, Mr. Modi in the election campaign explicitly referred to it as a divisive move. The BJP now seems to be on the verge of accepting the idea of a caste census. So there are lots of examples one can give where it just seems that either the government was not fully prepared, or the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing. In that sense, it seems to have lost much more administrative control than frankly we thought would happen.

The third thing and final thing I’d say, and this goes back to the point about Hindu nationalism, is the only place where you see continuity is there has been no letup in hate speech against Muslims from senior functionaries of the BJP, including some important chief ministers. And there has been no letup in acts of vigilante violence, or at least trying to use it in some ways to polarize communal identities, particularly in states that are going to election. It’s not a coincidence that a couple of these incidents of chasing people with beef happened in the state of Haryana, which is coming close to an election. That’s the only strand of continuity you see. On the rest, actually, the government seems to be not quite in as much administrative command as we are used to.

KANISHK THAROOR

Earlier this year, we published an essay by Ram Guha where he suggested that a coalition government is a much more natural form of governance for India, insofar as India is a vast democracy with so many different languages and religions and geographical regions to represent, and that the sort of contestation that comes with having coalition governance is far better for Indian democracy. Do you think that there’s merit to that idea? And do you think it bodes well for India in the coming term that the BJP is circumscribed in this way that it has to deal with a number of coalition allies to get anything done?

PRATAP BHANU MEHTA

I mean, I’d put the coalition point slightly differently, which is that if you are going to govern India without provoking much conflict, whatever the ruling dispensation is, it has to be a broad-based dispensation that gives different groups in society a confidence that this government is their government as well, that this government does not radically privilege one ethnic group over another and so forth, right? Now, the old joke used to be that the question is how do you create such a broad-based governance architecture? Now, in principle, you could imagine it happening within a political party. That was the old Congress Party, right? It was a very broad-based caste alliance, a very broad-based regional alliance, or you could actually imagine it happening through lots of different parties.

Now, I’m not actually entirely convinced that coalition government is a natural condition for India. In part, I’m not convinced because the ideological differences between the different constituents of coalition partners in the BJP aren’t actually that great. And what keeps the Indian party system fragmented is not that each of these parties represents some deep diversity. What keeps it fragmented is actually the fact that the national parties have become less inclusive. There are more entry barriers to those parties for newly mobilized social groups. They don’t have intra-party democracy. So if you’re a leader with a particular social base, you don’t have as much incentive to join an existing party as to, in a sense, create a new group. So I actually think that this fragmentation of the party system is actually not an artifact of India’s deep diversity. I think it’s an artifact of the institutional failings of principal national parties.

I think the second place where my emphasis would be slightly different than Ram Guha’s is that in India’s last protracted experience of coalition governments, from roughly the early 1990s to the rise of Mr. Modi, this 30-year period, many of the coalition partners and many of the regional constituents that went into these coalition governments used to have a much clearer stand against Hindu nationalism. I think what we are seeing now is that Hindu nationalism is not as much of a deal breaker for most coalition partners. None of the coalition partners have actually come out and taken strong exception to, for example, the kind of violent hate speech that many BJP politicians engage in. And that was, by the way, going on during the election as well. That was not a deal breaker for them. None of them have taken a significantly strong stand on violence against minorities. So what has happened, even in that coalition constellation, is that the default has actually switched slightly more rightwards than perhaps we were used to in previous rounds of coalition government.

KANISHK THAROOR

We’ve touched a little bit on the opposition. Now we have, for the first time in a decade, an opposition that we can perhaps even call galvanized. In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that my father is a member of the Congress Party, which is in opposition currently. But, Pratap, what do you think of the opposition’s prospects? To what extent is it cohesive? To what extent can it be a constructive force in parliament and elsewhere? What do you see it being capable of doing and what do you think it should be doing?

PRATAP BHANU MEHTA

So look, just by mere virtue of the fact that we have an opposition, just that fact is actually helpful for Indian democracy. Democracies survive by balance of power. Both parties don’t necessarily have to be virtuous for democracy to survive. And the second, I think, important significance of a more assertive opposition, particularly in parliament, is that it actually empowers all kinds of other institutions and actors. So even independent institutions like the courts actually try to read the political tea leaves. And if they have a sense that there is actually some political mobilization behind particular decisions, they respond differently. And I think you are beginning to see some of that, that many of those institutions, including the press, by the way, and the media, that had actually become one-sided, where we thought the government’s control was actually quite extensive, are actually feeling a little bit more emboldened and empowered. Partly, they just need to hedge because you actually don’t know who might be in government three years from now. You need to hedge because there are many state elections coming up, and in significant states, the opposition might actually win.

So in that sense, just by virtue of being in opposition, independently of its virtues or vices, the fact that it’s more assertive, it has actually, in a sense, opened up space. I think the difficulty for the opposition, or the challenge for the opposition, is the following. The BJP is not just a normal political party that will let them be in opposition, will welcome their winning an election sometime in the future, peacefully. Actually, the BJP is the party that can existentially make or break opposition parties using the machinery of the state, using tax laws, using administrative means, using outright bribery and corruption, enticing [inaudible]. And I think that last election was fought under that sense of existential dread for almost every single opposition party. So if nothing else, I think that’s something that actually does, I think, keep them together.

There are all of these ways in which, right now, I think the mood in the opposition is actually quite confident, quite optimistic. I think the challenge for the opposition is two things. One, that they have to demonstrate still, in the states that they win, that they can actually go from an oppositional coalition to a vigorous governing coalition. It’s easy to unite when you’re out of power, in some ways, when there’s an existential threat. The real test comes when you actually have to share the spoils of power, in some ways. And I think that’s where opposition, the unity in Maharashtra is actually, I think, going to be tested. And they have to signal strongly that they actually are a viable governing alternative to the BJP, because one of the things the BJP still banks on is the TINA factor–there is no alternative. And let’s remember the BJP’s share of the national vote hasn’t diminished much in the last election–it’s still about 42 percent. So they will need some governance successes that, I think, convince more and more people that they are actually a viable governing alternative, not just an opposition.

KANISHK THAROOR

I’m curious, you mentioned before that for Modi’s coalition partners, ideology wasn’t a sort of red line that they were worried about crossing. What is it for the opposition? I mean, should the opposition be interested in making ideology a battleground or should it be focusing on bread-and-butter governance issues?

PRATAP BHANU MEHTA

I don’t think it’s either or. I mean, all parties have to focus on bread-and-butter governance issues. I mean, at some point, even for Hindu nationalism, people say, “Should the BJP focus on Hindutva or should it focus on bread-and-butter governance issues?” I think the truth is that if you can demonstrate that you’re good at bread-and-butter governance issues, it actually increases the credibility of whatever ideology you are choosing. So in part, Hindutva grew because there was this kind of fascination with Mr. Modi’s governance capabilities. And as those have come under question, Hindutva’s charm, in some senses, is diminished.

I think the challenge for the opposition is it has to draw red lines. Otherwise, what’s the point of being in opposition, if there are no core moral values you stand for? And the core moral value in this case being, we can’t be a country where people are being targeted simply for being who they are. I mean, if you can’t even draw that red line, what’s the point of being in opposition? I think the challenge for the opposition is to draw this red line in a way in which it does not repeat the mistakes of the past. And what do I mean by this? So one of the charges against the Congress Party is that it has engaged in what the BJP calls minority appeasement. It has, in some senses, relegated the equal interest of Hindus to, as it were, the back-burner, right?

And there’s a bunch of political issues in which these concerns are expressed. So for example, a very live, big political issue that the Prime Minister has raised: India has a variety of personal laws where different religious communities are governed by a set of laws pertaining to marriage, divorce, inheritance, personal laws, that are specific to those communities. Now, it has been a longstanding BJP demand, but not just a BJP demand–actually, many secular parties have historically also argued for this–that India should actually have a common civil code, and a common civil code that’s a modern civil code that, in some senses, institutionalizes gender equality across all religions. Now, this is an issue that actually sunk the Congress Party in the 1980s because it was one of the issues on which Congress was thought to be not actually progressive, but siding with the most reactionary elements in the Muslim community. It wasn’t even Muslim appeasement. It was actually just siding with the most reactionary elements in Muslim community.

Now, what the opposition will need to do is, in some senses, develop much more sophisticated responses to proposals like the common civil code, not let Mr. Modi walk away with this kind of veneer of progressivism for his own opportunistic political lens, not revert to a politics that simply says, “Look, we are just going to stick to the status quo,” but actually argue on first principles that India needs to do both things simultaneously. It needs a civil code that, in some senses, embodies some uniform principles across the different civil codes, particularly around gender equality, rights of the LGBT community, and so on and so forth. You can’t escape those principles in a modern society and those are the right principles. And we will permit such diversity as is compatible with those principles. But it’s the issue that the opposition still has a little bit of difficulty articulating or taking a very clear stand on. So I think it’ll have to actually, rather than just use secularism as a slogan, get into the weeds of all these thorny issues that the BJP raises under the garb of Hindu nationalism, and develop intelligible, convincing, and principled responses to.

KANISHK THAROOR

In the last decade, according to various kinds of analyses, whether it’s by Freedom House or the V-Dem Institute, these bodies that measure the health of a country’s democracy, India has been sort of steadily backsliding on various counts. You’ve suggested that the sort of success of the opposition opens up potentially the possibility that India can sort of–I don’t know, what’s the opposite of backsliding–forward-sliding towards a healthier state. But I wonder if we could just go through the sort of checklist of democratic institutions and norms that have eroded. For instance, where do you see the judiciary going now? What indications do we have that the judiciary can function in a more independent way than it has in the last decade?

PRATAP BHANU MEHTA

I mean, I think you’re right. I mean, India was slipping in those indexes. And by the way, to Indian critics of those indexes, it’s also worth reminding them that so is the United States of America. I mean, they’re very same [sic]. So this is not some American conspiracy to downgrade Indian democracy. It’s just that democracy was having a hard time in many countries, including the United States, right? And the principal dimension on which India’s score was slipping–I mean, we can debate the methodology of these indexes–was India was actually still scoring reasonably high on electoral fairness and electoral competitiveness. The elements of liberal democracy on which India was doing much badly [sic] was civil liberties, freedom of the press, independent judiciary, the sanctioning of vigilante violence by state actors, right? Now, if we take these items, I think the judiciary, frankly, is a bit of a puzzle. I mean, I will be honest that there’s no clear explanation of why the Indian judiciary is in the state that it is.

The only thing we can see in the last few weeks, as I’ve said, since this election is the judiciary has become, once again, a little bit more protective of the civil liberties of individuals. But the reason I say it’s a bit of a mystery is because there’s a line amongst Delhi lawyers that the Indian judiciary is going one step forward, three steps sideways, and one step backwards, which is: these orders are still being inconsistently applied. So I think this is a work in progress. And we’ve seen in the past, actually, that one of the ways in which the judiciary has played a trick on Indian democracy is that it does enough things to keep people interested in the judiciary, legitimize, in a sense, itself, and then uses this legitimacy to go and do something really kind of catastrophically bad. And then you’re in this awkward position, well, you actually like those decisions. It’s the very same judiciary that is now actually sanctioning this arrest. There must be something there. So I think the judiciary is certainly, I think, the most important institution to watch.

I think the second most important institution to look at in India is freedom of expression, in all its institutional forms. And I think since this government has come to power for a third time, I have to say that there’s very little evidence that television media has moved at all in the direction of being fairer or allowing more space for the opposition. I’m not quite sure what the story there is. But I think all the kind of, not just anecdotal evidence, the sense is that television media is still very much closely aligned to the regime. I think what you are seeing a little less of, at least for the moment, is direct targeting of individuals in the way that we had gotten used to periodically. I think the only exception to this is the sanctioning of prosecution for Arundhati Roy on a sedition charge, but that’s still only sanctioning for prosecution. I mean, they haven’t quite followed up with it as forcefully as many of us feared.

KANISHK THAROOR

We should mention that Arundhati Roy is a well-known leftist writer and frequent critic of the Indian government here.

PRATAP BHANU MEHTA

And there’s a 20-year-old sedition case against her that this government seeks to revive. But again, this is, I think, a work in progress. And as I said, on the thing that matters most for India’s score, which is the status of minorities and the targeting of minorities, I don’t think you’re seeing any significant letup on that. So the opposition will have to actually become much more vigorous and put the fear of God in government on that issue.

KANISHK THAROOR

You mentioned that the economy might’ve played a significant role in shaping the election outcome. And in the article you wrote for us, you mentioned that India needs to find a way to better balance its growth. What did you mean by that and what do you see as the way forward for the Modi government in producing that balanced growth?

PRATAP BHANU MEHTA

I think there are two very obvious facts about the Indian economy, right? One, on any measure, inequality in the Indian economy has grown, and people talk of a K-shaped recovery after the pandemic. The top 20, 30 percent have done very well. Actually, the bottom, to be fair to the government, it has kind of created something of a floor under them through a bunch of welfare schemes, the free distribution of food, for example, some limited cash transfers. But the big middle is actually genuinely struggling. Rural wages have been stagnant. Private investment has not really taken off. And the structural transformation of the economy that we imagined, which is taking people out of agriculture and rural India into urban India into better quality, high paid jobs, those high paid jobs are still not being produced in nearly sufficient numbers, right? And I think even the government, grudgingly, admits that. I think it’s turned to increased welfarism and populism is in part a response to the absence of this structural transformation.

My own view on why this is happening is this government has two principle weaknesses, which it is not only not acknowledging, but not realizing. One, contrary to expectations, the government has actually created way more regulatory and tax uncertainty. So part of the process of reform was supposed to be creating a regime, which is administratively efficient, where there’s more regulatory uncertainty for private business, taxation regimes are clearer and fairer. But I think there’s consensus actually, even amongst the government supporters, that India has actually become a much harder place to do business. In part, it’ll also become a much harder place to do business because the government is also very clearly favoring particular business houses.

So the one question the government needs to ask is, after 10 years in power, why hasn’t private investment picked up? Whatever growth we are seeing is being pumped prime by government investment in infrastructure, which is now 70 percent of its capital expenditure. But what that also means is that you’re not investing in a couple of other critical areas, particularly education. The quality of human capital in India is much better than 10 years ago. It’s not as deep a binding constraint. But compared to our competitors, India still lags extraordinarily in the production of human capital.

KANISHK THAROOR

Shifting to India’s foreign policy, a big part of the image that Modi was projecting at home in the lead up to the elections was the notion that he had made India a sort of big player on the international stage, whether that was true or not. Is that still a powerful idea and does it have bearing on India’s actual foreign policy?

PRATAP BHANU MEHTA

I do think it is a powerful idea in domestic politics. And you could argue that in part, Mr. Modi has not done worse than he has because there is still this residual association of him as being a strong leader who’s brought respect to India in the international system. But to be honest, I think in foreign policy, the self-presentation of India has certainly changed. It’s much more aggressive. It’s laying claim to great-power status. But its actual conduct, I think there’s actually a lot more continuity than there is actually discontinuity.

And in terms of India’s own security situation, despite the fact that Mr. Modi claims to be the strong leader, India is actually in arguably a more precarious situation than it was 10 years ago. The most important fact being that India had a border clash with China. India is in this awkward position where officially, Mr. Modi can’t even say that India lost territory to China, or at least lost patrolling rights to disputed territory that it actually has. And Indian media actually has, in some senses, gone along with Mr. Modi in sort of doing almost a cover-up of what should have been a major domestic embarrassment, in some ways. India has more or less lost its neighborhood once again. Now, to be fair to India, I think our neighbors have their own internal contradictions and problems, Pakistan, Bangladesh, working out. But certainly, South Asia, which India hopes to outgrow, doesn’t look as sanguine a zone for India as it did seven to 10 years ago.

In terms of global politics, India is continuing on what I would still call a kind of non-alignment. I mean, we can call it multi-alignment. But the core of that policy, which Mr. Modi has actually executed reasonably well, is that everybody in the world should be better friends with India than they are with each other. So India is one of the few powers that’s talking to both Zelenskyy and Putin. It is actually still maintaining relationships with Iran and the United States. And in traditional Indian terms, that’s actually not a bad place to be, just in purely strategic terms–we can argue about India’s choices in particular cases. So I think the foreign policy, despite self-presentation, has actually been, as I said, remarkably not just traditional. But at least when it comes to the neighborhood, actually, I think what you see is more of India’s insecurities on display vis-a-vis China, vis-a-vis its neighbors, than a confident power that has kind of stitched up its own security environment to its benefit.

KANISHK THAROOR

India under Modi, along with China and potentially Russia, seems to be making the case that they are not so much nation-states, but civilization-states. Do you think that’s a project that has legs and that might continue beyond this government?

PRATAP BHANU MEHTA

So again, I think it’s a matter of self-presentation. And I think the term civilization-state has three or four connotations we need to disaggregate to see. So one, what they mean by civilization-state is that the state represents a particular civilization. And in India’s case, it’s Hindu civilization. So it’s actually a code for ethnic nationalism. It’s a nicer word for ethnic nationalism, in some ways. That’s what it actually amounts to in its current articulation.

The second, which we see in the case of Putin, in the case of China, is claim to extraterritorial ambition, if not actually seizing territory, exercising greater hegemony outside your boundaries, right? So is the Middle Kingdom, in the case of China. Putin wants to create Peter the Great’s Russia or whatever that is, or the USSR. I think to be fair to India, I don’t see quite that extraterritorial ambition. Yes, officially, parts of Hindu nationalist ideology think of the entire subcontinent as kind of sacred territory and would like a sort of reunification. But that’s hypothetical.

And to be fair, I think the one big difference between India and Russia on the one hand, and China on the other, is that even under Mr. Modi, there is no whiff of militarism in Indian foreign policy. India’s defense expenditure is not rising. India’s modernization of its forces is proceeding at exactly the glacial place it has for the last 10, 15 years, or actually a longer kind of arc. And even in the one case where Mr. Modi was very assertive, which was the strike on Pakistan in Balakot, the minute Pakistan captured the first airman, Captain Abhinandan, the entire effort was to actually get that one single soldier back home. So I have to say, to be fair to Mr. Modi, I don’t think militarism, in the sense that we are associating with Putin or potentially associating with China, is actually part of the makeup of the civilizational-state.

And the final thing with the civilizational-state is that older civilizational states contrasted themselves with nation-states, right? That’s the contrast. But one of the contrasts was supposed to be that a civilization is like a more unbounded territory. Your borders are porous. There’s a kind of gradation of identities. On that front, actually, Mr. Modi is a very conventional nation-state guy. I mean, the last thing India most obsesses about is borders. It’s not going to accept creative solutions to our sovereignty conundrums with Pakistan or China. It’s a much more sovereignist power. But these are elements that have been around for a long time, I think, in Indian foreign policy. And I think even though they’re using the term civilization-state, it represents more continuity than discontinuity, particularly on the kind of militarism and projection of external power.

KANISHK THAROOR

Let’s end by just taking a step back. In the last decade, there has been chatter, both within India and outside of India, that Modi’s supremacy has revealed something essential about the country that was obscured before. And that is that even though India’s founders imagined the country as a sort of liberal, secular, pluralistic country, that indeed there’s sort of an illiberal core to it, and Modi has successfully tapped that. What do you make of that assessment?

PRATAP BHANU MEHTA

I find these arguments too ahistorical and too essentialist. This is not just true of India. I mean, I think this is true of the way we think of the history of democracy everywhere. In the United States, I mean, did Trump reveal an irrevocable American core? Let’s put it this way. All democracies have a strand of ethno-nationalist supremacism within them. And India has had it for a long time. There’s no question about it. And arguably, it would have been actually stronger in the 1950s if Gandhi had not been assassinated, because Gandhi’s assassination delegitimized Hindu nationalism, and I think, gave the Congress and Nehru, I think, breathing room. So that strand has always been, I think, a strand in Indian politics, and it’s a strand that derives not from some essential core about Indian civilization. It’s a strand that’s an inevitable consequence of modern nationalism. It’s a problem that arises in the context of creating a modern nation-state. Almost every single modern nation-state that has been created has been created under conditions of ethnic majoritarianism of one form or the other, right?

So there’s nothing particularly exceptional about India, as if India was sui generis. The question to ask is... And I don’t for a moment believe this narrative that there was a thin veneer of liberal elitism on top and this core bubbling from the bottom. I don’t believe it for two reasons. One, even today, it’s actually more likely that if Hindu nationalism is resisted, it is actually resisted by the poor and rural India rather than by India’s anglicized elite. So sociologically, that actually doesn’t map. But second, I think it’s a little bit unkind to India’s history in the 1950s and 60s. Jawaharlal Nehru, like Mr. Modi, won three successive elections. It was a moment of national trauma when he died. And to say that that was just a moment of liberal veneer, you have to then ask this question, how this person we dismiss as the last bourgeois, the last Englishman, was able to mobilize tens of millions of people behind him? They were willing to put their trust in him no matter what his own cultural predilections might be, right?

The Congress Party in the 1980s wins 400 seats. It wins three-fourths of India’s Parliament, and then loses it within a span of five years. So I actually think that rather than say that it’s revealed an essential core, I think the question to ask is, what is it about the failures of liberal-centrist, leftist governance that has actually allowed Hindu nationalism this veneer of plausibility? That’s, I think, the much more productive question than saying, “There is this deep core that resides in the masses, and now that the old elites have been shunted out, it’s the genuine masses rising.” It was the genuine masses that were also behind Gandhi and Nehru. Let’s not actually rewrite that history.

KANISHK THAROOR

Well, Pratap, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. I think we’ll conclude on that note. And as ever, it’s a pleasure to hear from you.

PRATAP BHANU MEHTA

Thank you so much as always for this opportunity and your wonderful questions.